Mark Millar Interview, Part 2: On Being Punched in the Face

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LEV: OK, last few questions. You mentioned earlier, Watchmen, one of your three favorite comics. What are the other two?

[I know that interview-wise, this is kind of a dick move. But the door was open.]

MARK: I would say that the Dark Knight Returns definitely is my all-time favorite comic. Number two I would say would be Watchmen. The other one I’d say would be Frank Miller, it’d be a toss up between … yeah, Batman: Year One.

Actually, if I could even change my earlier thing, I’d say that’s probably even more of an influence on Kick-Ass, because that’s about Bruce Wayne putting on his tights for the first time and going out and trying to get into trouble. That is the comic that actually inspired my friends and I to begin doing it. So yeah, that’s absolutely the origin of Kick-Ass. I hadn’t actually considered it until I’m saying it out loud, but we were so impressed by Batman: Year One, and it seemed so real to us that it was possible.

LEV: Are you going straight on to a sequel? Or what’s next?

MARK: Most comic books are on a monthly schedule and run for years, but I quite like to do special projects. I never want to be a hack, and just have good periods and bad periods on a run. I’d rather put everything I’ve got into it. So I’ve always seen Kick-Ass as a trilogy, and it may go bigger, because I think there’s a lot of potential with it.

The first book’s all about superheroes. The second book I want to make like A Clockwork Orange, and make it all about street gangs being super villains,and those guys are on Facebook with each other, and recording on their cell phones terrible things that they’ve been doing, and posting it up on the internet. So I just thought there could be something cool, kind of like Warriors or A Clockwork Orange, where you have gangs of heroes versus gangs of villains.

And then finally a third book I have an idea for as well. So yeah, probably a trilogy.

LEV: Do you have another project in mind with Matthew Vaughn?

MARK: It’s funny actually. Matthew and I just clicked. So we’re certainly planning on doing the sequel, but we’re going to do another movie in between Kick-Ass 1 and 2. It will be another comic book property that we’re just going to create.

This is quite an important thing that I’m really starting to realize, which is that in the 1930s, you had all those characters like Superman and Batman created in what we call the Golden Age of comics. And then nothing happens for a generation, and then you have Marvel and its nuclear age heroes, with Spiderman and all the radioactive heroes, Hulk and X-Men and so on. And then just nothing happened. It was really odd. What was happening was that writers and artists were coming in wanting to write and draw the stuff they grew up, with as opposed to creating the next generation of characters. So really in the 90s we should have had a wave of characters, but it never really quite happened.

I was talking to Stan Lee about this, and he said, “I don’t know why anyone isn’t doing this, because if I had just written Superman and Batman and the stuff I read in the 30s, you would have never had Marvel comics.” So somebody has to come in and do the new stuff.

Since then I’ve seen it as my kind of mission, I’ve started up this Millar World line — American Jesus, War Heroes is over at Sony as a film, there’s Kick-Ass coming out through Lions Gate, and the next one coming out is this thing Nemesis. So I just feel over the next five years I would like to create, maybe, 10 to 15 big books that could go on to have lives as movies or video games or whatever and just add something to the mix? Because nobody else is doing it. Everyone else is doing Superman and Batman. I’d love to create the new wave.

LEV: Well, good luck to you, man. If anybody can do it, it’s you.

MARK: I don’t know why it’s ended up being some stupid guy from rural Scotland who dropped out of university, I’m sure there had to be a smarter American who should have been doing this.

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